Playing around with a Uniden Bearcat BC 100XLT scanner that my girlfriend found sitting amongst a bunch of electronic junk that I keep in a plastic tub. It’s mostly there in case I need something because you never know when you’ll need it.
Anyway, she decides to see if it works. She thinks back to the days when she would leave the scanner on hoping to be able to catch some action going on with the police department. It brought a smile to her face. She looks so pretty when she smiles like that.
My dad and mom used to sit in the living room listening to their scanner. They had a little tabletop model. Dad would come into the room and sit down in his chair first thing in the morning. By this time in his life he was well into his forced retirement due to his failing health. Dad had emphysema and was on oxygen 24 hours a day. He would turn the scanner on and start to listen. If it squelched you would hear an audible “shhhhush” because he thought something big was going to happen. He wanted us kids, who were bustling around the house trying to get ready to go to our jobs, to be quite so he wouldn’t miss anything important. 99% of the time it would just end up being that single squelch and then dead air. But that didn’t matter because there was always that possibility it would be something big. He would remember the time this happened or that happened…and he would bend your ear if you let him.
So, back to the Uniden BC 100XLT Scanner radio. I’m waiting for the owners manual to download. We have ATT DSL line here. When I lived in my townhouse I had Comcast cable. What I liked about cable was it was a much bigger wire and so it was much faster, it could handle a boat load of data. ATT’s puny little telephone wire can’t handle butkus. I’ve been trying to download the pdf manual I found online and for some strange reason it is taking forever to open this file online. Once it does I will save it to my hard drive. But until then I am writing this post.
What I need to find out is how do I get the battery cover off so I can replace the battery. There’s this arrow on the left side pointing to the left. I get the idea that I should push on it so it will slide to the left. Guess what? It doesn’t slide. The closest I’ve come to removing the cover is to pry open the very bottom. This doesn’t remove the cover because it is pinching the top into the main casing of the scanner. I can pry it up, but I cannot pry it off. I see the battery pack. It’s 3 AA’s shrink wrapped together. I used to sell these way back in the 1980’s and 90’s for cordless telephones.
Well, the manual finally downloaded and I saved it to the hard drive. It’s useless. Doesn’t say a word about the battery. Oh well, delete it. I’ll have to look at my list of vendors and see if any of them either have worked on this model or they know someone who has.
